Audiobooks: New features

[abu]

Hi,
I just uploaded a new patch that adds some stuff for audiobook lovers:

Finally, they show up in the Audiobooks menu of your iPod! It took a long time, but finally I found out what has to be tweaked in the database to make this happen.

Additionally, you can have chapter markers every N seconds, which makes skipping through the book easier.



Patch v2.04p09 has it, and 2.05 will have it officially...

[Yawg81]

nice addition but i've never really listened/downloaded audiobooks.. which type of audiobooks do you listen to? or other people here on this forum?

[abu]

Personally, I LOVE audiobooks. Have of the time with my iPod is audiobooks (or podcasts).
I listen to phantasy books, detective stories, thrillers...
Coolest thing for me during long drives! Keeps me awake.
I have some from audible.com, and some are ripped rom CDs to MP3. Audiobooks were the reason I started to add stuff to ml_ipod - it did not upport it at all at that time.

[Bitdiddle]

Originally posted by abu
Hi,
I just uploaded a new patch that adds some stuff for audiobook lovers:

Finally, they show up in the Audiobooks menu of your iPod! It took a long time, but finally I found out what has to be tweaked in the database to make this happen.

Is there still the limitation with the file extension, so that audiobook files have to have .aa ür .m4b extension? If so, would it be possible to do an on-the-fly-renaming, that means, *.mp3 tagged as audiobook-genre will be put as *.aa/*.m4b on the iPod?

wr,
Bitdiddle

[abu]

The limitation is gone. mp3 audiobooks show up in the Audiobooks section now.

[Bitdiddle]

Originally posted by abu
The limitation is gone. mp3 audiobooks show up in the Audiobooks section now.

As usual at me, it does not work. [p26] :-)
I tagged a audiobook with "Speech" (shown so in ML), but this book in a static ML-playlist and transferred this playlist via sync (i also set the genre for Audiobook in ml_ipod to "Speech", only one entry).

Audiobook menu still is empty on the iPOD. The playlist is there in the audio playlist menu, and the files are also.

Anything else to have in mind about this?

wr,
Bitdiddle

[slov92]

I have to agree with Bitdiddle on this.

I have tried all combinations and can only get the audiobook to appear in the music folder. [p29]

[abu]

Oh, what's going on here? I use it every day, and it works with MP3. You must retransfer it, though (the settings get only updated at transfer time).

[slov92]

Originally posted by abu
Oh, what's going on here? I use it every day, and it works with MP3. You must retransfer it, though (the settings get only updated at transfer time).

Tried again but still not showing up.

My tag:
artist: Yann Martel
album: Life of Pi - Disc 1
Filename / Title: Track 1, Track 2, Track 3 etc etc
Genre: Audiobook
Format: mp3

Ml ipod: Preferences - Audiobooks - Basics - Audiobook genres: Audiobook

Drag folder from explorer to ML.
Copy to: Ipod

Eject ipod through ml ipod

Shows up only in music folder and under album.

Win amp 5.34 mlipod 2.04p29 ipod video 5g (30gb)

[abu]

Please post the part of the device debuglog that shows this track (starting with get_mhit #...). Simply search for "Yann Martel" in the log.

[slov92]

get_mhit #1618 position:1340224
ipod_id:1790 seek for mhods:1340552 compi:0 skip_shuff:1 len=328
has_artwork=2 aw_cnt=0 aw_size=0
gapless: 0 + 0 + 0 / 0 sc=3162
- TITLE: Track 02
- ARTIST: Yann Martel
- ALBUM: Life of Pi - Disc 1
- GENRE: Audiobook
- PATH: :iPod_Control:Music:F19:ml_ipod01790.mp3
- CHAPTERDATA found, len: 142

[abu]

Strange, this looks fine. the CHAPTERDATA is the important piece, and it's present.

[flippertie]

I like the new chapter marking feature - makes it easier to pick up where I was in the middle of a long podcast/audiobook, but (and there's always a but...) when I enable the chapter marking and sync my podcasts I can no longer rate them on the ipod. Rating music files still works.

I guess this could be intentional - people only want to rate music, not news broadcasts right? But it's a bit of bummer for me as I'm using a "rating >= 1" query to decide when to delete podcasts from the ipod.

I'm using latest winamp and ml_ipod on an original Nano.

[flippertie]

Originally posted by flippertie
I'm using latest winamp and ml_ipod on an original Nano.

doh! just updated to the latest ml_ipod via the mans sig and presto all is working. My mistake.

[abu]

Originally posted by slov92
get_mhit #1618 position:1340224
ipod_id:1790 seek for mhods:1340552 compi:0 skip_shuff:1 len=328
has_artwork=2 aw_cnt=0 aw_size=0
gapless: 0 + 0 + 0 / 0 sc=3162
- TITLE: Track 02
- ARTIST: Yann Martel
- ALBUM: Life of Pi - Disc 1
- GENRE: Audiobook
- PATH: :iPod_Control:Music:F19:ml_ipod01790.mp3
- CHAPTERDATA found, len: 142

As this looks perfectly right, could it be that you don't have the latest firmware on your iPod? Maybe they added this lately, I don't know. It's the only thing I can think of right now...

[Bitdiddle]

Originally posted by abu
As this looks perfectly right, could it be that you don't have the latest firmware on your iPod? Maybe they added this lately, I don't know. It's the only thing I can think of right now...

Mine is 1.2.1. I'll give it a 2nd try with the latest version of ml_ipod (p33 or so).

wr,
Bitdiddle

[abu]

Seems to work on the nano only
I only tested on this up to now. On my 80GB iPod, it doesn't work.

[flippertie]

Me again - still having problems with being able to rate some podcasts - eg Newspod from downloads.bbc.co.uk . It seems to be connected to having the chapter feature enabled - but i cant get consistent results.

Is it possible that some problem with the format of MP3 files I'm downloading is stopping me putting a rating on some of them?

Has anyone else seen anything like this?

[abu]

It is related to the setting "Remove rated podcasts from this iPod during a podcast sync". If that is checked, the rating page should be shown.

[Bitdiddle]

Originally posted by abu
Seems to work on the nano only
I only tested on this up to now. On my 80GB iPod, it doesn't work.

Any idea, any chance?

[abu]

Not for the moment. Actually, I was surprised when it started to work on the nano. It was only a side effect of the chapter data addition...

[Bitdiddle]

Originally posted by abu
Not for the moment. Actually, I was surprised when it started to work on the nano. It was only a side effect of the chapter data addition...

Abu, if the files had *.aa/*.m4b extension, would it then work (did not try it yet)? If so, then putting the right extension during file transfer might help here?

[abu]

If it was m4a, it might help to rename to m4b on the fly. With mp3, no way.

[Bitdiddle]

Originally posted by abu
If it was m4a, it might help to rename to m4b on the fly. With mp3, no way.

Ok i see - it is not just the extension but also the audio format?

[abu]

Correct.

[Stupifier]

Is this still a work in progress than....just wondering what to say in the Wiki about this new feature.

[frauhottelmann]

I have a question. I have never used iTunes to transfer a Audiobook, so I don't know if it is the same there. But when I transfer it with ml_ipod and play it, it shows the time that is remaining like wit every song, but it shows over 1000 hours left, which is a little strange. It was a *.m4b. Any suggestions?

[abu]

Huh, that's weird. The only reason I can think of is that Winamp reports the length wrongly (ml_iPod does not calculate it itself). I don't use m4b, so I'm not sure (have everything in mp3). maybe it helps if you add m4b to the extension list in the MP4 input plugin (as described for m4v for video in the Wiki)?

[frauhottelmann]

That was it! Now the chapter marking works too (it didn't before)! You are a genius! Thanks

PS: I'll add that to the wiki!

[Stupifier]

Thankyou Frauhottelmann for the Wiki add.

[Bitdiddle]

Abu,

i played around with the audiobooky in the near past, and also with some video files. For both i have some questions.

(1) I have (for example) an audiobook currently encoded as MP3 files, with several tracks, ripped from CD (so not one big file but several chapters, each in one file). I wanted them to appear under music->audiobooks, and because of the file format stuff i tried to recode them to "iPOD format". I used one of the winamp onboard MP4/aac encoders via sendto->formatconverter and got *.M4A files.

Loading these files to the iPOD results not showing them up under audiobooks. 2nd try was to rename these files simply from m4a to m4b, and then this worked - all files show up under audiobooks.

(a) Does somebody the exact difference between m4a and m4b files and which one to use?
(b) Is there some way to automatically recode audiobook files to "m4b" during transfer /only for audiobooks/ (i think the current transcoding settings only allow transcoding enabled in general)? If not i would find this very nice as a new feature and fully acceptable to get audiobooks working.
(c) As i had chapter based mp3 files, now i have chapter based m4b files, each of them showing up in the audiobooks menu in pieces (not the one audiobook as a whole), and the worse, in some undefined sort order (at least it seems to be). I think i have to combine the several files into one large one - i this right? If so, does somebody know a good tool for doing this (best would be that the tool is able to insert chapter markers after each file). It also would be a cool mlipod feature to combine the files on-the-fly during tranfer to the iPOD, which also would make it possible to insert chapter markers in the result at the appropriate locations.

--

Complete other thing in this context: Chapter markers in video files. Do they work in general, or only for podcast videos? I ask this because i ripped some of my music live DVDs into one big file with chapter markers in it for each music title (works under quicktime, u can jump there to each chapter directly; btw: did it with handspring, nice oss), but it seems that there is no way to jump to chapters on the iPOD (didn't try it for podcasts, the files shows up as "normal" music video). Is my observation currect in this point?

As ever, many regards,
Bitdiddle

[abu]

There is no difference between m4a and m4b regarding the contents. Only the iPod takes m4b being an audiobook, thus showing it in the right menu. That's all.
If an MP3 is markes as audiobook by genre in ml_ipod, it should show up there, too. I saw it a lot of times on the 80GB video iPod and on the nano 2G, but somehow this is not reliable. I don't know what the problem is

If you have several tracks, they always show up as individual entries in the iPod menu. You'll have to join them. For MP3, there is MP3AlbumMaker, which works fine for me. But no chapter markers.
Actually, ml_ipods support for chapter markes is not based on embedded metadata at all. It simply puts chapter markers at constant distance. That helps to skip through a long audiobook, but has nothing to do with real chapters

This fake chapter data is generated for audiobooks and podcasts only. Migzt be present for video podcasts too, havn't tried it. But definitely not for other video kinds.

[kaatinthehaat]

Hi Abu.

Any new developments with audiobooks? On my 80G video ipod the audiobooks do NOT show up under audiobooks. I can access them under "Genre" or "Albums" because they are labelled with the book title as the album. They are mp3's with the genre set to "Audiobook".

Also, I have noticed that when playing back a video on the ipod, if you pause at a certain point, play will resume from that point even if you play a second video or music before returning to the first video. It would be great if audiobooks behaved this way as well (ie. resumed from the same place even if something else was played in the mean time.) I hope that makes sense.

Thanks.

[abu]

The resume thing has worked for ages already... That was the main reason for implementing it.
Maybe your audiobooks do not have one of the genres that are listed in the audiobooks prefs of ml_ipod?
I need some more information to gain some insight. Maybe a debugging archive helps, create it with
"RightClick on the iPod icon in the Media Library-->Help-->Create archive for bug report"
and upload it to http://stashbox.org for me... Tell me which tracks are audiobooks. Thanks

[kaatinthehaat]

The genre is listed in the prefs; I checked that already. I'll upload the archive and post again after.

Thanks.

[kaatinthehaat]

Abu,

I have uploaded the file. Check your PM for details. One of the audiobooks is listed as "Star Wars" (artist), "Legacy of the Force" (album), "Bloodlines......." (titles).

Thanks.

[kaatinthehaat]

By the way, the resume function does actually work after all. The only thing is that the Audiobooks don't show up under the "Audiobooks" label in the Main Menu.

[abu]

Ok so, if the resume work (which is what I expected), the main part is all right. Looking at the files, everythings looks pretty good, too.
And if I transfer your database to my nano (2G), it shows all these books in the audiobooks section, as expected.
Conclusion: Seems to be a firmware bug of your iPod version. maybe there is a newer FW available for the 80GB video iPod?

[kaatinthehaat]

I'll check. Also, when I get a chance I'll try putting an audiobook on my Nano and see if it shows up in the Audiobooks section. The resume function is the most important thing though. As I said, it's easy to access the audiobooks in the Genre section.

Thanks again Abu for your great support and for all the awesome work you do on this plugin.

[abu]

I used to use a smart playlist for that. Works fine.